Associated media

Layla Bloom is surrounded by beauty at the V&A, London

‘The Cult of Beauty’ (2 April – 17 July 2011), the V&A’s sweeping showcase of the glories of the Aesthetic movement in British art, more than lives up to its title.  An exaltation of pure beauty, in painting, sculpture, costume and the decorative arts between the 1860s and the 1890s, the exhibition is primarily a feast for the senses.  True to the Aesthetic commandment of  ‘art for art’s sake’, the exhibition primarily delights the eye – full of colour, artful lighting effects and brimming with objects in an often dense, yet pleasing, installation. It manages too, to engage the ear, with Aesthetic poetry readings piped into the rooms at select junctures, and even the sense of touch: a wall of soft Grosvenor Gallery-inspired ‘greenery-yallery’ fabric bears the marks of enchanted visitors’ caresses. To further augment your synaesthetic experience, an audio guide – narrated by Rupert Everett, no less – provides a truly decadent treat.

Like any surfeit of pure deliciousness, however, the exhibition leaves the keener visitor wanting something more substantial. Thankfully, the catalogue offers just that. While the scholarship underpinning the exhibition is referred to at points throughout the display, it is only in quick glimpses, and it never quite manages to convey the rich narratives and critical depth of the book. Even so, attractively priced at only £35 in hardback, this weighty compilation is accessible to a wide audience in terms of cost, as well as readability.

What can seem monolithic in the exhibition is revealed to be more multifaceted in the book. Stephen Calloway, one of the curators, points out that

those who came to be identified in this period as protagonists of the Cult of Beauty – the poets and painters, makers or thinkers – were perhaps more united in their opposition to prevailing orthodoxies concerning art and design than in any comfortably shared vision or precise definition of the beautiful.

Indeed, the Aesthetic avant-garde was a design reform, a response to declining standards in British manufactured goods – especially embarrassing after Britain’s poor showing in product design at the 1851 Great Exhibition.  The Aesthetic movement was also part of a wider moralistic mission to improve the taste of the newly powerful bourgeoisie. The South Kensington Museum, now the V&A, was established using the profits of the Great Exhibition, and tasked with both invigorating the industrial arts and refining the British public’s taste.

The catalogue covers the many intertwined aspects of the Aesthetic movement: literature, painting, photography, music, blue-and-white china, interior design and architecture, costume, and the ‘book beautiful’.

Aestheticism’s elite avant-garde coteries emerged in the 1860s – distinguished by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Frederic Watts, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Algernon Swinburne and James McNeill Whistler.  Aestheticism then gradually colonized taste in the 1870s through the Grosvenor Gallery and wealthy patrons, and culminated in the fashion for ‘the House Beautiful’ and associated popular lifestyle design trends of the 1870s and ’80s. By the 1890s, the movement seems to have been discredited by satire (such as Gilbert & Sullivan’s Patience), and its final flowering was tainted by accusations of decadence, especially in relation to new proponents such as the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. (Oscar Wilde’s trials took place in 1895.)

The catalogue is refreshingly varied but can seem overwhelming. The diversity of views and approaches to the subject can make for a confusing narrative. Anyone reading the book from start to finish would encounter a fair amount of repetition, as each author re-introduces the scene and its players. Hence the book is best enjoyed in tasty little bites, and it can certainly serve as an engaging reference book to the fine and decorative arts of the period.

The 1890s are often described as the ‘Decadent’ decline of the Aesthetic movement, but Calloway proposes that the last decade of the movement should instead be seen as ‘the final expression of a sensibility that we might define as the ultimate refinement of aesthetic response, the final flowering of Aestheticism’s intellectual and artistic pose’. Another contributor, Elizabeth Prettejohn agrees, describing the art of beauty as ‘an art of magnificence’. More poignantly, Calloway invokes the poet Baudelaire to describe this final phase as ‘like the sunset of a dying star…glorious, without heat and full of melancholy’. 

But something was also being born, a new stage that is hinted at in the section on contemporary ceramics, in its references to the humorous ceramic creations of Edward William Godwin and the playful creatures of William de Morgan. Something rough and satirical, perhaps even deliberately grotesque, was emerging, that couldbalance the smooth prettiness of a Leighton or a Burne-Jones. After all, the Aesthetic movement had been attacked for being too languid and self-consciously serious. Surely, the Decadent style was, at least in part, a response to this criticism, an attempt to show another side of beauty. Arguably the 1890s artists had a more sophisticated and modern approach to what was ‘beautiful’: beauty might be strange and dark, or even commonplace and vulgar.

Now more than a hundred years later, ‘The Cult of Beauty’ is poised for success with contemporary audiences. The subject is one close to the heart of the V&A, which is happily revisiting its 19^th-century roots. The V&A was formed in the same crucible as the Aesthetic movement and the museum has never deviated from its original goal of inspiring beauty and excellence in British design. Echoing Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the America in 1882 to promote the ideas of Aestheticism, so too ‘The Cult of Beauty’ will travel to the Musée D’Orsay in Paris later this year and then onto the de Young Museum in San Francisco, in early 2012. Our fascination with the 19^th century is at a peak, witness the BBC TV series  ‘The Crimson Petal and The White’ and touring exhibitions such as the Mercer Art Gallery’s ‘Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight’. We have come a long way since the critic Clive Bell proclaimed in 1914 that ‘These Victorians are intolerable.’

An investigation of the past is often most productive in revealing aspects of the present.  What does The Cult of Beauty tell us about our own times?  Are we simply seeking solace for current hardships in the glories of our past, or does engaging with the past represent something more challenging? In her essay in the catalogue, Prettejohn suggests that retrospection is more than just mindless imitation of the past, but encourages reflection on universal human concepts such as love and death. Quoting Sidney Colvin’s review of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, ‘The past is ours and the present is ours and imagination is ours; let us do with them all the best we severally can,’ Prettejohn declares that objects embracing the past in this way ‘may absorb the mind as well as the eye’. In other words, the delicacies of Aestheticism in ‘The Cult of Beauty’ can be more than just an indulgence; they can truly be food for thought.

The catalogue is divided into seven themes: ‘Literature and the Aesthetic Movement,’ ‘Aestheticism in Painting,’ ‘“The Palace of Art”: Artists, Collectors and their Houses,’ ‘Furnishing the Aesthetic Interior: Manuals and Theories,’ ‘The Grosvenor Gallery, Patronage and the Aesthetic Portrait,’ ‘Aestheticisim in the Marketplace: Fashion, Lifestyle and Popular Taste,’ and ‘“Tired Hedonists”: The Decadence of the Aesthetic Movement.’ Shorter, more focused texts explore aspects such as ‘Blue-and-White China,’ ‘Aesthetic Textiles,’ and ‘Jewellery’, and the movement’s key personalities, including the scholar Walter Pater and Wilde, the ever-present Aesthetic promoter. There is also a look at social contexts, as in ‘The “Aesthetic” Woman’ and ‘Religion and Sexuality’.

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 is edited by Stephen Calloway and Lynne Federle Orr and published by V&A Publishing 2011. 288 pp., 250 colour illus. ISBN 9781851776283